Tag Archive: Twitter

In this video we hear the interview of C.W. Anderson about the influence of social media in activism and the power that it holds. He explains that it is important to understand that the technology itself does nothing, but that it is the people that make the movement. This paints social media in the light that I believe it should be, as a tool to be utilized by the people rather than a force that cannot be directed or controlled. Media plays a significant role in many things, activism being one, but without the people to power it… its just another piece of technology.

Socialhoosier.com is a website that utilizes the Twitter widgets to present a specific niche of information from Twitter users posts. The niche target market is an IUBB fan so that they will be able to view the most up to date news and information on Indiana University Men’s Basketball. The site includes two live feeds; on the left is a feed that includes Tom Crean, current players and other common IUBB media tweeters and on the right is a feed that searches for all public accounts who include the term ‘IUBB’ which is the most common tag for fans when they tweet about Indiana Basketball.

My motivation for this project was my passion for Indiana University Basketball and the booming growth of Twitter users. IUBB has an enormous following on Twitter and provides fans a vast amount of information from many different sources and many different types of people. I have used some of the Twitter API in the past and thought it would be a really cool way to use an open source language to be able to cater to the IUBB fans.

Initially I was hoping to code using the API and PHP but for the amount of time I could spend on this project I found an alternative solution. The alternative that I found was the widgets, which are Twitter scripts. These allowed me to minimize my API coding so that I could spend more time on developing the HTML and CSS of this site. I began by just jumping into creating a basic site and then each week I continued adding on features as I thought of new things I wanted to include.

As I said previously I had hoped to learn more of the API and PHP though I found that extremely time consuming and had to find an alternative in order to complete the project on time. Mainly I learned more about HTML and CSS because I have little experience in web design but I also added features like the media buttons. I also learned how to publish my site using a domain name, which I had never done before now.

I hope that after more development of this site it may be used by fans of IUBB as a source of news and information about our team. I plan on continuing to work on this site and try to improve upon it even more. I believe those fans that do not have or do not want to create a Twitter account but still would like to see what people are saying on the social networking site might use this site.

Twitter is the new craze and has been for a while. While so many people are apart of this network, some are not. I think that Twitter is a very successful tool but it isn’t utilized to it’s full potential. The company I worked for this summer was very hesitant about joining Twitter in the social media marketing aspect because they did not see the need to “microblog” about what they were eating for lunch that day. While some celebrities and companies use it for news, events etc. some users use it for status updates during their day. I think society steers away from what this application could be used for. This sides with the argument of Williams, believing that society shapes technology. Williams sees technology as being improved to better the human experience as well as accomplishing certain technological tasks, such as blogging.

However, it also could side with McLuhan. McLuhan believes the newly developed technology will change the behavior of mankind. Twitter allows for the population to say whatever, whenever. Users can view these blogs at that time or at a later time. This may change what the users blogs, when they blog it and what it may pertain to at that given time. I think Twitter fits right into this argument, depending on what way one looks at it.